The Horror Megapack_ 25 Classic and Modern Horror Stories ( PDFDrive )

instinctively trying to draw her tattered ensemble down about her hips. And then
Aunt Célie appeared, black, sombre and malignant. The sinister black woman
knelt beside the hearth and struck light. In a moment she had a fire kindled and
was heaping it with charcoal.
The walking corpses lined themselves against the wall, awaiting orders. It was
only then that Connell fully realized what had mauled and pounded him and
Madeline.
They were breathing; but their lack of expression reminded him of a dog he
had once seen in a vivisection laboratory. The greater portion of the animal’s
brain had been removed; it lived, but it was a living log. And those black men
had only enough brain left to let their reflexes function.
“How do you like my crew of zombies?” murmured Ducoin as the woman set a
kettle of water over the glowing coals.
Zombies! That one word rounded out Council’s rising horror. They were
corpses stolen from unguarded graves and had been reanimated by a primal
necromancy to serve as farm cattle! Zombies, toiling as no dumb beast could.
Rich profits, farming a plantation with hands like those. He wondered why Aunt
Célie knelt swaying and muttering before the kettle into which she tossed dried
herbs, and bits of bark and roots and pebbles.
“Pretty nice, eh?” was Ducoin’s satirical comment. “I learned the trick at Haiti,
and I’m going to add you to my string of zombies. Once Aunt Célie mixes you a
drink you won’t be so interested in women.”
Wrath blazed in Ducoin’s eyes as his glance shifted to his disheveled niece.
“I don’t know what you two were doing,” he murmured, “but I can fairly well
guess. Or else she wouldn’t have been so willing to go away with you. Just
another no-good wench. She’ll be a very good zombie herself—”
“You damn’ dirty rat!” snarled Connell. “Do you mean—”
“Certainly,” answered Ducoin. “After fooling around with you, she’s no niece
of mine. In this day and age I can’t give her what she deserves, but making her a
zombie is different. Nobody will inquire out here on the Delta. And she’ll not be
playing around with strangers any more.”
Another guttural command. The corpse men marched over to Madeline’s bed
as returning consciousness stirred her. Connell, struggling against his bonds, saw
them stripping her dress to tatters as they throttled her into submission.
Shuddering with horror at the grisly contact, Madeline finally surrendered, and
the zombies methodically lashed her to another chair. Her dress was a pitiful rag.
Her clawed breasts were half exposed, and her bruised legs peeped through the